I am very sensible, madam, of the hardship to my fair cousins, and could say much on the subject, but that I am cautious of appearing forward and precipitate.

Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice

His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- The Great Gatsby

At that Mr. Heelas fled precipitately upstairs, and the rest of the chase is beyond his purview.

H.G. Wells -- The Invisible Man

Seeing the throng, Marija abandoned precipitately the debate concerning the ancestors of her coachman, and, springing from the moving carriage, plunged in and proceeded to clear a way to the hall.

Upton Sinclair -- The Jungle

He was not prone to rashness and precipitate action;

Jack London -- The Call of the Wild

The aircar flung itself through the air at R17 and above, deposited them next to the Heart of Gold which stood starkly on the frozen ground like a bleached bone, and then precipitately hurled itself back in the direction whence they had come, presumably on important business of its own.

Douglas Adams -- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

He talked precipitately, and I did not try to stop him.

Joseph Conrad -- Heart of Darkness

The monkey had come out on Jack’s shoulder, but no sooner did it catch sight of the jackal, than it fled precipitately back into the tent, and hid itself in a heap of moss until nothing was visible but the tip of its little nose.

Johann Wyss -- The Swiss Family Robinson

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He was always keyed up, alert for attack, wary of being attacked, with an eye for sudden and unexpected missiles, prepared to act precipitately and coolly, to leap in with a flash of teeth, or to leap away with a menacing snarl.

Jack London -- White Fang

Despairing of all further efforts, I was precipitately leaving him, when a final thought occurred to me—one which had not been wholly unindulged before.

Herman Melville -- Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street

They did not know whether they were cries of pain or joy; but they started up precipitately with that inquietude and alarm which every little thing inspires in an unknown country.

Voltaire -- Candide

At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three things.

Henry James -- The Turn of the Screw

His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward.

Edgar Allan Poe -- The Purloined Letter

Exit Estragon left, precipitately.

Samuel Beckett -- Waiting for Godot

The crowd at the door fell back precipitately.

Stephen Crane -- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

They went with the churches, and you were left with the grey slow dawns and the precipitate nights as the only measurements of time.

Graham Greene -- The Power and the Glory

Yet all these changes were, in one sense, so fantastic and had been made so precipitately that it wasn’t easy to regard them as likely to have any permanence.

Albert Camus -- The Plague

But now that I was beginning to understand something of his quality, I could divine the stress he laid on doing nothing precipitately.

H.G. Wells -- The War of the Worlds

Laoghaire dropped the tray on the table next to the door, almost upsetting the decanter in her haste, and turning, fled precipitately.

Diana Gabaldon -- Outlander

He concealed himself precipitately in a ditch, and there CHAPTER VI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

Amy, who was fond of delicate fare, took a heaping spoonful, choked, hid her face in her napkin, and left the table precipitately.

Louisa May Alcott -- Little Women

You moved too precipitately for the good of our enterprise.

Frank Herbert -- Dune

Still further, in Buckingham’s lodging, which he had been forced to abandon more precipitately than he expected, papers were found which confirmed this alliance and which, as the cardinal asserts in his memoirs, strongly compromised Mme. de Chevreuse and consequently the queen.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

Under its influence, he exclaimed aloud: "She expects you, and is at hand"; and precipitately left the cavern.

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Last of the Mohicans

A little later, with the exquisite manners of the alcoholic that are like the manners of a prisoner or a family servant, he said good-by to an acquaintance, and turning around discovered that the bar’s great moment was over as precipitately as it had begun.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Tender is the Night

Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had come to town for a few days from Skuytercliff, whither they had precipitately fled at the announcement of Beaufort’s failure.

Edith Wharton -- The Age of Innocence

They depart, more precipitately.

Wole Soyinka -- Death and the King’s Horseman

Then she saw the captain frown, a beautiful young girl who was leaning against him gazed at him with disdainful lips and irritated eyes; then Phoebus uttered some words which did not reach her, and both disappeared precipitately behind the window opening upon the balcony, which closed after them.

Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

With Asa then the retired quite precipitately to a small room back of the mission hall.

Theodore Dreiser -- An American Tragedy

Without relinquishing her hold of Jude’s hand she swerved aside and flung herself down on the sod under a stunted thorn, precipitately pulling Jude on to his knees at the same time.

Thomas Hardy -- Jude the Obscure

He looked at her, Leonora said, with what was practically a glance of hatred and then, precipitately, he left the breakfast-table.

Ford Madox Ford -- The Good Soldier

So they go out in a loose procession, something after the manner of a straggling funeral, and make their inspection in Mr. Krook’s back second floor, from which a few of the jurymen retire pale and precipitately.

Charles Dickens -- Bleak House

…addresses; but seeing that she delays, I believe the truth of the promise she has given me that the next time thou art absent from the house she will grant me an interview in the closet where thy jewels are kept (and it was true that Camilla used to meet him there); but I do not wish thee to rush precipitately to take vengeance, for the sin is as yet only committed in intention, and Camilla’s may change perhaps between this and the appointed time, and repentance spring up in its place.

Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote

’Are you certain?’ demanded Nicholas, precipitately; ’not even to my mother or sister?

Charles Dickens -- Nicholas Nickleby

She herself had taken up the making of a toy for the curate’s children, and was not going to enter on any subject too precipitately.

George Eliot -- Middlemarch

Whether Mr. Creakle was in earnest, or whether he only did it to frighten me, I don’t know, but he made a burst out of his chair, before which I precipitately retreated, without waiting for the escort Of the man with the wooden leg, and never once stopped until I reached my own bedroom, where, finding I was not pursued, I went to bed, as it was time, and lay quaking, for a couple of hours.

Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield

All these sons of Dhritarashtra, together with the hosts of monarchs, and Bhishma, Drona, and Karna, and the warrior chiefs of our side as well, enter precipitately thy tusked and terrible mouths, frightful to behold.

Joseph Campbell -- The Hero With a Thousand Faces

And falling precipitately upon a prayer-book bound in purple velvet, with gilt clasps, out of which in her haste she let fall a shower of the little pictures, each in a lace fringe of yellowish paper, which she used to mark the places of the greater feasts of the church, my aunt, while she swallowed her drops, began at full speed to mutter the words of the sacred text, its meaning being slightly clouded in her brain by the uncertainty whether the pepsin, when taken so long after the…

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

Both rose, rather precipitately, and with a toss of her head, Aunt Bertha hurried into the front room to get their coats, leaving Mr. Sternowitz stranded in the kitchen.

Henry Roth -- Call It Sleep

"Lord help us, they are perfect devils!" said Marks, heading the retreat down the rocks with much more of a will than he had joined the ascent, while all the party came tumbling precipitately after him,—the fat constable, in particular, blowing and puffing in a very energetic manner.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The little champion of Rum Alley stumbled precipitately down the other side.

Stephen Crane -- Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed.

Henry James -- The Turn of the Screw

He rushed forward precipitately rather than walked, hoping to find some side-street, to make his escape through it, and thus to break his scent once more.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

At such times, confronted by three sets of savage teeth, the young wolf stopped precipitately, throwing himself back on his haunches, with forelegs stiff, mouth menacing, and mane bristling.

Jack London -- White Fang

He could not understand why Leonora should have abandoned him so precipitately when she only thought that he had gone yachting with the Clinton Morleys.

Ford Madox Ford -- The Good Soldier

It seems that there was something like a panic in a restaurant because a customer suddenly felt ill, went very white, and staggered precipitately to the door.

Albert Camus -- The Plague

Laurie backed precipitately into a corner, and put his hands behind him with an imploring gesture.

Louisa May Alcott -- Little Women

As the laugh subsided, Mrs. March began to thank Mr. Brooke for his faithful care of her husband, at which Mr. Brooke suddenly remembered that Mr. March needed rest, and seizing Laurie, he precipitately retired.

The accident precipitated the union strike for better working conditions.

She expressed concern that withdrawal of UN troops will precipitate chaos and tribal warfare.

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Something was about to happen, and they were waiting for it, waiting with the unanimous, unstable mob-mind for the one of them who would make the first action that would precipitate all of them into a common action.

The crisis precipitated by the Russia’s revolution

...for it is certainly possible ... to provoke and precipitate the people into the wildest excesses.

Alexander Hamilton -- Federalist Papers

Our economy precipitated into complete ruin

it was a greater delight slyly to precipitate a fight amongst his mates

Jack London -- The Call of the Wild

...a sinking of the machinery would precipitate that keen, glistening axe upon my bosom.

Edgar Allan Poe -- The Pit and the Pendulum

it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence.

Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Letter from a Birmingham Jail

The essence of pearl mixed with essence of men and a curious dark residue was precipitated.

John Steinbeck -- The Pearl

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The quarrel was probably precipitated by Amanda’s interruption of Tom’s creative labor.

Tennessee Williams -- The Glass Menagerie

The precipitating event is invariably domestic: a dispute with girlfriends or parents.

Malcolm Gladwell -- The Tipping Point

The sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- Winter Dreams

Halfway down, she looked back up at me, and I knew she was still wondering what exactly had precipitated this sudden acquiescence.

Sarah Dessen -- Lock and Key

...I’d like to know, in your own words, what it was that precipitated that decision.

Sarah Dessen -- The Truth About Forever

I call it a revolution because I now see how, with the word he spoke, the curtain rose on the last act of my dreadful drama, and the catastrophe was precipitated.

Her crossing to his world would be precipitated by falling asleep here.

Ted Dekker -- White: The Great Pursuit

Independence from Spain and then the abolition of slavery precipitated the conditions of honorable decadence in which Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been born and raised.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera

Her crossing back would be precipitated by dreaming there.

Ted Dekker -- White: The Great Pursuit

He had gone to her de confiance, as they put it in Paris; but it was possible he had been precipitate.

Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2

The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it.

Thomas Hardy -- The Return of the Native

And they were the first sight encountered by Brewster Place’s third generation of children, who drifted into the block and precipitated the exodus of the remaining Mediterranean.

Gloria Naylor -- The Women of Brewster Place

The recommendation to play ball with France was precipitated by information from Thomas Hunter.

Ted Dekker -- White: The Great Pursuit

Here, pois’d upon his wings, the god descends: Then, rested thus, he from the tow’ring height Plung’d downward, with precipitated flight, Lights on the seas, and skims along the flood.

Virgil -- The Aeneid

Honest James ran to his assistance, hauled him up, and from the effort he made was precipitated into the sea in sight of the sailor, who left him to perish, without deigning to look at him.

Voltaire -- Candide

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels -- The Communist Manifesto

The violence of his fall precipitated Mrs Squeers completely over an adjacent form; and Squeers striking his head against it in his descent, lay at his full length on the ground, stunned and motionless.

Charles Dickens -- Nicholas Nickleby

By a rapid movement, which the gendarme’s practiced eye had perceived, Dantes sprang forward to precipitate himself into the sea; but four vigorous arms seized him as his feet quitted the bottom of the boat.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

It may appear to some readers that the young lady was both precipitate and unduly fastidious; but the latter of these facts, if the charge be true, may serve to exonerate her from the discredit of the former.

Henry James -- The Portrait of a Lady - Volumes 1 & 2

He had hardly uttered the name of his wife, before the whole of the crouching circle rose in a body, and tumbling over each other, they precipitated themselves down the dangerous passes of the rock with ungovernable impatience.

James Fenimore Cooper -- The Prairie

After only ten days in the Senate he had irritated his seniors and precipitated a three-hour debate by objecting to a routine resolution calling upon Senators to wear crepe one month in honor of three recently deceased patriots.

John F. Kennedy -- Profiles in Courage

Hether the Father of the Fire, by night, Thro’ the brown air precipitates his flight.

Virgil -- The Aeneid

During her entire stay there, he had lived that life of ecstasy which suspends material perceptions and precipitates the whole soul on a single point.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

That I could double-distill, perform titration, calcify, sublimate, and precipitate solution.

Patrick Rothfuss -- The Name of the Wind

I would have made a pilgrimage to the highest peak of the Andes, could I when there have precipitated him to their base.

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein

You would not call it murder if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands.

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein

Hast Never Come to Thee an Hour Hast never come to thee an hour, A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all these bubbles, fashions, wealth?

Walt Whitman -- Leaves of Grass

The prize was certainly great; but it was only to be won by striking the happy mean between precipitancy and caution.

Henry James -- Washington Square

The dripping of water precipitated from the windtrap filled the room with its presence.